Portrait of my Girlfriend :)

[Robin Usagani]

Thanks, I am booked out next months and just got a few spot lefts til end of november, so my photography can't be too bad. Good luck to you too!

There are probably two thousand Craigslist and Facebook photographers who are booked almost solid thru December, but bookings do not have much bearing on photographer skill, artistry, or ability. Good composition is not "old-fashioned". Good composition is truly timeless. "Timeless". It has not changed in thousands of years. The elements and principles of design have never changed. Of course, those points are unfamiliar to those who have not studied art, or design, or "serious" photographic technique and theory.

Once again: there is NO SUCH THING as "old-fashioned composition". That statement reveals an immense misunderstanding of design, and of composition. The huge influx of self-taught, uneducated shooters these days has reallllly diluted the understanding of what composition really means.

Lets count.. how many of us went to school for art?

PS... This is the same BS bickering back and forward about horizontal and vertical. I had this same argument with derrel like... a few months ago.


Derrel, did you do professional passport photo back then? If you did, everything makes sense.

 

[Robin Usagani]

]Vertical or landscape.. Who cares! I am sick of those comments. Yes, portraits do work in landscape too! Why being so anal?[/B]

Anyway, nice shot. For me its just a bit overworked. Looks plastic. Skin, eyes....

I am curious.. Between us, Derrel and I probably have about Sixty to Seventy years of combined experience. We both are or have been Professionals with successful working studios. Maybe we have some basis for what we recommend!

Out of curiousity, how long have you even been shooting? Owned a SLR or DSLR? Just trying to get a basis here for your comments here! Are they just based on opinion (what you like) or do you actually have some knowledge that we don't have?

Come on Charlie.... you are better than this.

 

[Derrel]

Dude...I never said "go to school for art."

Educating one's self is as simple as picking up a %^*king BOOK and READING it. Geebuz...

EDUCATION is free. Try some learning. Who said "go to school for art?" Oh..that would be Schwetty...the weekend warrior wedding worker...

 

[Robin Usagani]

Dude...I never said "go to school for art."

Educating one's self is as simple as picking up a %^*king BOOK and READING it. Geebuz...

EDUCATION is free. Try some learning. Who said "go to school for art?" Oh..that would be Schwetty...the weekend warrior wedding worker...

Yes.. seeing other successful wedding photographers work is EDUCATION too! Guess what... they do a lot of horizontal.

 

[SCraig]

Charlie if you don't understand why people will purchase a high-resolution camera and then use a grain affect on their images, why they will purchase expensive lenses and then use a soft-focus affect on their images, why they will use a viewfinder grid to get things straight only to rotate them later, why they will attempt to get well-balanced images out of the camera only to grossly overexpose them in post processing, why they will take multiple shots to combine them into a high dynamic range image only to blow the colors and saturation into some cartoon world, or why they will worry about white balance only to tint them urine yellow, then what makes you think you will ever understand the nuances of modern photographic composition?

Oh, wait. I don't understand that stuff either!

 

[JAC526]

Are we all having a good time?

Have we considered the idea of maybe growing up?

You are in the wrong place. People hijack threads to pursue personal vendettas all the time on this forum.

And guess what....the Mods just let it happen.

 

[MTVision]

You are in the wrong place. People hijack threads to pursue personal vendettas all the time on this forum.

And guess what....the Mods just let it happen.

C'mon - that doesn't happen here!!

 

[cgipson1]

]Vertical or landscape.. Who cares! I am sick of those comments. Yes, portraits do work in landscape too! Why being so anal?[/B]

Anyway, nice shot. For me its just a bit overworked. Looks plastic. Skin, eyes....

I am curious.. Between us, Derrel and I probably have about Sixty to Seventy years of combined experience. We both are or have been Professionals with successful working studios. Maybe we have some basis for what we recommend!

Out of curiousity, how long have you even been shooting? Owned a SLR or DSLR? Just trying to get a basis here for your comments here! Are they just based on opinion (what you like) or do you actually have some knowledge that we don't have?

Come on Charlie.... you are better than this.

maybe.. but rude noobs get me going!

 

[slackercruster]

Dude...I never said "go to school for art."

Educating one's self is as simple as picking up a %^*king BOOK and READING it. Geebuz...

EDUCATION is free. Try some learning. Who said "go to school for art?" Oh..that would be Schwetty...the weekend warrior wedding worker...

Yea, that is right. Books are cheap as hell from Amazon and Half. Buy books, read em, blast away...learn.

If poor, use the library, TONS of books and DVD's from interlibrary loan.

Or go to school and pay big $.

 

[cgipson1]

Dude...I never said "go to school for art."

Educating one's self is as simple as picking up a %^*king BOOK and READING it. Geebuz...

EDUCATION is free. Try some learning. Who said "go to school for art?" Oh..that would be Schwetty...the weekend warrior wedding worker...

Yes.. seeing other successful wedding photographers work is EDUCATION too! Guess what... they do a lot of horizontal.

So do porn shoots... so?

 

[manaheim]

Lew, I maintain that intent is irrelevant.

You're perfectly right that there's a lot that goes in to making a photograph, or any other act of art, "work". Photography is practically unique in that you CAN actually accomplish it by accident, without the slightest intent. It's unlikely, it's rare. If you work with intent and with understanding the rate at which you produce photographs that "work" will probably increase, no matter what you mean by "work". This doesn't mean that it you cannot get an astonishing work of art by allowing your camera to fall to the ground where a stray dog will step on the shutter release. It's really really unlikely, but it's hypothetically possible, which means we must remove intent from the equation. What if the dog precisely duplicated a well-know superb image? Would the dog's image be crap anyways, despite being identical? There's a class of weenies who will certainly argue that it is, but they make arguments that vanish into a maze of incomprehensible terminology which conceals from everyone -- especially the person making the argument -- that the argument makes no sense.

This makes a LOT of people VERY uncomfortable with photography as art, albeit fewer than in the past now that we've been struck with conceptual art and Andy Warhol. The idea that art can result from an accident, without a shred of intent, seems violently wrong even to me. I accept it only because the alternative is too awash in contradiction.

Again, I am not trying to devalue training and thought and intent or any of those things -- they are valuable, they are useful, they are powerful. I merely say that they are not the things that make the difference between Art and Not-Art.

This is silly. Art comes from intent.

Saying otherwise is again trying to make an excuse for the accidental artist.

Nothing wrong with getting lucky, of course, but the accidental artist can't always do it when called upon, and that's pretty significant.

 

[JAC526]

You are in the wrong place. People hijack threads to pursue personal vendettas all the time on this forum.

And guess what....the Mods just let it happen.

C'mon - that doesn't happen here!!

Its really poor form. I feel kind of bad for the OP. I doubt he cares that Derrel and Tyler dislike eachother.

And yet they turn his thread into their own soap opera.

 

[Derrel]

Some good points of view are interspersed throughout this thread. A wide cross-section of experience, understanding, age, and level of involvement with photography, art, and design is to be found within this thread. Early on in the thread, a few of us suggested in *OUR C&C*, that perhaps a vertical composition would have made this a more-successful "portrait of my girlfriend" type shot.

C&C is pretty broad...a few of us emphasized one,simple basic concept that must be decided on EVERY FRAME...how to best utilize the entire compositional space. I think the ORIGINAL POSTER'S PHOTO would have been better-framed with a lot less what some people call "negative space". AND, me, and a few others, thought that chopping off the top of her head was not "the best approach". And what was the response from those who disagreed like???

The_Traveller made some good points about the rationale behind the framing, as he saw the picture...cgipson raised some points, Bitter_Jeweler raised some others....and a few people vehemently stepped up and tried to turn this into a newbie versus "old-fashioned,fuddy-duddy" argument.

My last comment, for now, until something completely amazing is posted is this: read through the thread, and read what was posted, then look at some of the outrageous innuendo and personal attacks coming from people who disagreed with the original few C&C providers (C&C providers, plural not just "Me, Derrel")....and then...decide what you believe. And now, I am off to talk to my lawn mowing guy about which new Macintosh software he thinks I need to buy!

 

[amolitor]

This is silly. Art comes from intent.

Saying otherwise is again trying to make an excuse for the accidental artist.

Nothing wrong with getting lucky, of course, but the accidental artist can't always do it when called upon, and that's pretty significant.

You are not, in my view, sufficiently disentangling the artist from the art. You might even be defining "art" to be "that which is produced by an artist," I don't know. Depending on what you mean by "art" the answers will vary, but pretty much regardless of your position on that there are major problems with denying that an accident can ever be art, one of which I outlined earlier.

 

[camz]

You know there's two schools here and they are both important. What I've noticed from our sales is that, the negative, tilted, creative, horizontal images with negative space, artistic shots are the ones that land the client. These are the images that get them to hire us based on "style" lol whatever that means. But...but...guess what these clients who hired us based on our style choose from their prints? You will never guess. As young modern and ubranized the San Francisco market is, they typically choose the prom poses, the looking into camera traditionals that they hang on their walls. Regarding print sales...I'm with Charlie and Derrel. If you don't sell prints...you will never see this perspective.